Visual Studio LINK fatal error LNK1181 cannot open input file

Question

I ve been encountering a strange bug in Visual Studio 2010 for some time now   I have a solution consisting of a project which compiles to a static library  and another project which is really simple but depends on this library   Sometimes  in the last days extremely frequent  after Rebuilding the Solution or just compiling it with 1-3 changed source files  I get the following error   2 gt LINK   fatal error LNK1181  cannot open input file  thelibrary lib             Rebuild All  1 succeeded  1 failed  0 skipped              Where compiling thelibrary lib was a success without any errors or warnings   I have tried cleaning the solution  but that doesn t always work    What is wrong here

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I had the same error when running lib exe from cmd on Windows with a long argument list  apparently cmd exe has max line length of about 8K characters  which resulted that the filenames at the end of this threshold got changed  thus resulting in bad filename error  my solution was to trim the line  I removed all paths from filenames and added single path using  LIBPATH option  for example    LIBPATH absolute path  OUT outfilename filename1 obj filename2 obj     filenameN obj

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I m stumbling into the same issue   For me it seems to be caused by having 2 projects with the same name  one depending on the other   For example  I have one project named Foo which produces Foo lib   I then have another project that s also named Foo which produces Foo exe and links in Foo lib   I watched the file activity w  Process Monitor   What seems to be happening is Foo lib  is built first--which is proper because Foo exe  is marked as depending on Foo lib    This is all fine and builds successfully  and is placed in the output directory--  OutDir   TargetName   TargetExt    Then Foo exe  is triggered to rebuild   Well  a rebuild is a clean followed by a build   It seems like the  clean  stage of Foo exe is deleting Foo lib from the output directory   This also explains why a subsequent  build  works--that doesn t delete output files   A bug in VS I guess   Unfortunately I don t have a solution to the problem as it involves Rebuild   A workaround is to manually issue Clean  and then Build

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In my case I had the library installed using NuGet package  cpprestsdk  AND I falsely added the lib to the Additional Dependancies in the Linker settings  It turns out  the package does it all for you   The linker then tried to find the library in the library path and of course could not find it   After removing the library from the Additional Dependencies everything compiled and linked fine

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I found a different solution for this     Actually  I missed comma separator between two library paths  After adding common it worked for me   Go to  Project properties - gt  Linker - gt  General - gt  Link Library Dependencies At this path make sure the path of the library is correct   Previous Code  With Bug - because I forgot to separate two lib paths with comma     lt Link gt  lt AdditionalLibraryDirectories gt       Build lib   Configuration         Build Release     AdditionalLibraryDirectories  lt  AdditionalLibraryDirectories gt      Code after fix  Just separate libraries with comma     lt Link gt  lt AdditionalLibraryDirectories gt       Build lib   Configuration          Build Release     AdditionalLibraryDirectories  lt  AdditionalLibraryDirectories gt      Hope this will help you

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I can see only 1 things happening here  You did t set properly dependences to thelibrary lib in your project meaning that thelibrary lib is built in the wrong order  Or in the same time if you have more then 1 CPU build configuration  which can also explain randomness of the error      You can change the project dependences  in  Menu- Project- Project Dependencies

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I recently hit the same error   Some digging brought up this  http   support microsoft com kb 815645  Basically  if you have spaces in the path of the  lib  that s bad   Don t know if that s what s happening for you  but seems reasonably possible   The fix is either 1  put the lib reference in  quotes   or 2  add the lib s path to your Library Directories  Configuration Properties    VC   Directories

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I had the same issue in both VS 2010 and VS 2012  On my system the first static lib was built and then got immediately deleted when the main project started building   The problem is the common intermediate folder for several projects  Just assign separate intermediate folder for each project   Read more on this here

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I don t know why  but changing the Linker- Input- Additional Dependencies reference from  dxguid lib  to  C  Program Files  x86  Microsoft DirectX SDK  June 2010  Lib x86 dxguid lib   in my case  was the only thing that worked

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I created a bin directory at the project dir level  then created a release debug directory inside the bin folder  which solved the problem for me

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Go to   Project properties - gt  Linker - gt  General - gt  Link Library Dependencies set No

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I solved it with the following   Go to View-  Property Pages -  Configuration Properties -  Linker -  Input  Under additional dependencies add the thelibrary lib   Don t use any quotations

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I had a similar problem in that I was getting LINK1181 errors on the  OBJ file that was part of the project itself  and there were only 2  cxx files in the entire project     Initially I had setup the project to generate an  EXE in Visual Studio  and then in the  Property Pages - gt  Configuration Properties - gt  General - gt  Project Defaults - gt  Configuration Type  I changed the  EXE to  DLL  Suspecting that somehow Visual Studio 2008 was getting confused  I recreated the entire solution from scratch using  DLL mode right from the start  Problem went away after that  I imagine if you manually picked your way through the  vcproj and other related files you could figure out how to fix things without starting from scratch  but my program consisted of two  cpp files so it was easier to start over

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You can also fix the spaces-in-path problem by specifying the library path in DOS  8 3  format   To get the 8 3 form  do  at the command line    DIR  AD  X   recursively through every level of the directories

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Maybe you have a hardware problem   I had the same problem on my old system  AMD 1800 MHz CPU  1GB RAM  Windows 7 Ultimate   until I changed the 2x 512 MB RAM to 2x 1GB RAM  Haven t had any problems since  Also other  minor  problems disappeared  Guess those two 512 MB modules didn t like each other that much  because 2x 512 MB   1GB or 1x 512 MB   2x 1GB didn t work properly either

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For me the problem was a wrong include directory  I have no idea why this caused the error with the seemingly missing lib as the include directory only contains the header files  And the library directory had the correct path set

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I had the same problem  Solved it by defining a macro OBJECTS that contains all the linker objects e g    OBJECTS   target exe kernel32 lib mylib lib  etc    And then specifying   OBJECTS  on the linker s command line   I don t use Visual Studio though  just nmake and a  MAK file

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In Linker  general  additional library directories  add the directory to the  dll or  libs you have included in Linker  Input  It does not work if you put this in VC   Directories  Library Directories

[c++] Visual Studio: LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file

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